Polite Calamities
Ratings1
Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
In a hazy 1960s Rhode Island summer, three disparate lives converge and combust in this riveting story of the empowerment women find in friendship, solidarity, and rage, from the author of Halfway to You.
Winifred is blunt, opinionated, and outrageously colorful. In a community that demands domesticity, she simply doesn’t fit. When her wealthy husband suddenly dies, Winifred’s fellow society housewives no longer have a reason to play nice. Cast out entirely, Winifred throws roaring parties for the clerks and waiters that serve the town, finding the connections she’s been craving—and upsetting the gentle balance of her elite neighborhood in the process.
Flailing artist Marie wants to paint over her past before the painful memories consume her. On the brink of making a longtime dream come true, her newfound friendship with Winifred might be the key to finally moving forward—or her undoing.
High-society housewife June weathers a chronic pain that would make other women faint. With her veneer crumbling, she has no patience for the free spirit shaking up her community. Filled with a mixture of obsessive hatred and fascination for the outcast, June’s determined to destroy Winifred and return her life to the way it used to be.
When slow-simmering summer secrets and resentments finally reach the boiling point, everyone is at risk of being burned. Polite Calamities explores what “community” really means when societal survival is at stake, and what happens when women decide it’s time to stop behaving and start living.
Reviews with the most likes.
Atmospheric But Long. This book almost feels like a Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid, but an East Coast variant. It has the same 60s era setting, the same type of fire-based setup and ending, but then tells a more "East Coast" feeling tale of the era, in some ways dealing with some of the same kinds of relational topics... but from that "Old Money" / "High Society" kind of East Coast / New England vibe.
That noted, this is far from a clone of the other, and it does what it does in showing the various relationship dynamics of its ladies - each in different societal strata - remarkably well. Gold clearly put in a lot of effort to make each of these women as real and relatable as possible, and she truly did a good job there - we begin to sympathize to a degree even with our ostensible villain of the tale... even as she continues to show *why* she is the villain. Along the way, we encounter so much of that admittedly lily white social scene and period the tale is set in, in interesting ways that show both the warts and the beauty of each of our characters.
The one real criticism I have here is that the book *does* go perhaps 30-50 pages long. Not a "Return Of The King After The Coronation" slog, but certainly a "this could've been trimmed a bit" feeling, at least after completing it. Now, where, exactly, could the cuts have been made... becomes perhaps less clear. Which would perhaps indicate that the book is exactly as long as it needed to be. I'll leave it to the reader of this review to read the book for yourself and make your own calls there. (Also, please leave a review when you do. They don't have to be anywhere near as wordy as mine tend to be - 24 words will be accepted on any review site I know of, including the big corporate ones.)
Ultimately this was a solid book of its kind, one that *should* be seen as an equal or perhaps even superior of Malibu Rising... but which clearly hasn't had Reid's marketing people behind it. ;)
Very much recommended.
Originally posted at bookanon.com.
